Real Estate Trends – Boston’s Beacon Hill (Condos)

Introduction:

Welcome back again for our latest real estate market trend report. For those of you that are here for the first time what we do in these reports is examine the real estate market in a city or town in Massachusetts or New Hampshire to evaluate the current conditions. We do this by looking at the changes in three key metrics year over year for the municipality to see how the market has changed and then evaluate what those observations might mean for that market moving forward.

Market Trends in Boston’s Beacon Hill, MA – December 2014 and 2015:

The Beacon Bill, MA condo market has fallen off a little bit since last year. The average prices were down some and the median prices were down as well. The days on market were up somewhat as well. Inventory was down going from 16 sales in December of 2014 to 12 in December 2015.

Average Listing Prices:

We will first start off by looking at the average listing price. For condos in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, MA the average listing price in December 2014 was $824,375. This was down to $729,575 in December 2015. This gives a pretty large decrease of 11.50% year over year.

Looking at the median prices we see that it was a bit lower in both years. For December of 2014 the median listing price for Beacon Hill, MA condos was $757,500 and in December 2015 it was $707,000 which now gives a much smaller decrease of 6.67%.

Average Sale Prices:

The next thing we will be looking at is the average sale prices. The average sale price for a condo in Boston, MA’s Beacon Hill area in December of 2014 was $812,781 and in December 2015 that was down to $736,250. That gives another significant decrease of 9.42%.

We see a fairly similar pattern with the median sale prices as we did for the listing prices. For December of 2014 the median sales price for condos in Boston’s Beacon Hill was $732,500 and in December 2015 it was $696,000 giving another smaller decrease of 4.98%.

This month prices are down some for condos in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, MA compared to last year. Since medians are the preferred metric compared to the averages we would say that lower drop is more representative than the 9.5-11.5% drop suggested by the averages. Therefore in our opinion prices are down right around 5% to just a touch more than that for Beacon Hill, MA condos in December.

Average Days on Market:

Finally the last metric we look at are the average days on market, which is the measure of how long it takes for a property to sell in the current market. For condos in the Beacon Hill part of Boston, MA the average days on market in December of 2014 were 28.75 and the average days on market for December 2015 were 36.50 for a pretty good 26.96% increase. It is worth looking a little closer at the absolute numbers and realizing that a 27% increase does only translate to just over 1 extra week. So while this increase is very real, at the moment even the recent higher days on market are considered to be pretty good it is just last year was very good.

Boston’s Beacon Hill, Mass Summary:

The Beacon Hill, Massachusetts condo real estate market is down a little bit since last year. The average prices were down a lot and median prices were down as well, but a bit less. The days on market are up a good amount, but were still pretty good.

In summary if you are looking to sell a condo in Boston, MA’s Beacon Hill neighborhood now you should expect to get a little less for it than you would have gotten last year. You can also expect it to take a little more time to sell compared to last year as well.